User blog:Ben 1,000,911/Saga Narration
This is a blog post that will chronicle the narration of Saga. It is mostly narrated by Hazel, but occasionally others such as Dengo and the book's author speak as well. # Chapter 1 *Hazel **This is how an idea becomes real. But ideas are fragile things. Most don't live long outside of the ether from which they were pulled, kicking and screaming. That's why people create with someone else. Two minds can sometimes improve the odds of an idea's survival... but there are no guarantees. Anyway, this is the day I was born. **It was a time of war. Isn't it always. I was born on a planet called CLEAVE, an anicent ball of mud circling a faded old star. It never had much strategic value, but the place still mattered. To me, anyway. See, this is where my parents met, but it's not where they were from. They grew up way over here, back where the war began. This is LANDFALL, largest planet in the galaxy, and also my mother's home. Its one and only satelite is WREATH, my father's native moon. If there was ever a time these two got along, nobody remembers it. When the war with Wreath started, it was fought amidst the general population, in cities like this one, Landfall's capital. But because the destruction of one would only send the other spinning out of orbit, both sides began to OUTSOURCE combat to foreign lands. While peace was restored at home, the conflict soon engulfed every other world, with each species forced to pick a side - planet or moon. Some of the locals never stopped thinking about the battles being waged in their names on distant soil. Most didn't really give a shit. **From my very first day, I was persued by men. All of them tried to hurt me, but only one managed to break my heart. Sorry, getting ahead of myself. **He just couldn't say no to her. But if he'd known what wheels had started spinning over on Wreath, my father never would have left those tunnels. **My name is Hazel. I started out as an idea, but I ended up something more. Not much more, to be honest. It's not like I grow up to become some great war hero or any sort of all-important savior... but thanks to these two, at least I get to grow old. Not everybody does. : 2. Chapter 2 *Hazel **Actually, against all odds, I'd been alive three whole days. My family's quest for Cleave's mythical Rocketship Forest had sent us doubling back into its all-too-real Endless Woods. Dad had been awake for sixty-five of the seventy-two hours since I was born. Mom hadn't closed her eyes once. **If there's an opposite of a honeymoon, it's the week after a couple's first child is born. No matter how hard they try, no matter how pure their intentions... everything will go wrong. And that's when the gawkers show up. From far and wide they come to inspect hapless new planets. The nice ones bring food. : 3. Chapter 3 *Hazel **My mom once said the hardest part of parenting is knowing when to ask for help.Even the most independent of new parents will need backup weathering the occasional shitstorm. It doesn't take a village to raise children, it takes a whole galaxy - former friends, random acquaintances, complete strangers... even other children. **Despite what you may have heard, good help isn't all that hard to find... it's just hard to find cheap. **Help can be nice, but some jobs are just too important to delegate. **Rich kids get nannies, but the rest of us have babysitters. Izabel was my first. : 4. Chapter 4 *Hazel **Doesn't matter if it's personal or professional, a good partnership takes work. That's what Mom was beginning to realize on the other side of the galaxy, where my father was still fighting for his life. With the help of our new sitter, my parents and I had traveled halfway across the planet Cleave in search of a miracle. The trip had not been without complications. **The Will wasn't the first bounty hunter to come after my parents, and he won't be the last. Like every Freelancer I had the misfortune to eventually meet, he was a fucking MONSTER. But as my family was about to learn, some monsters are worse than others. : 5. Chapter 6 *Hazel **Once upon a time, each of us was somebody's kid. Everyone had a father, even if he never provided anything more than his seed. Everyone had a mother, even if she had to leave us on a stranger's doorstep. No matter how we're eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too. **So yeah, this is where I grew up. Most of my childhood was spent clinging to the feathers of a dulled arrow blindly fired across a starless night. It was heaven. For a while, anyway. **And then my grandparents came to live with us. : 6. Chapter 7 *Hazel **I should rewind for a second. This is my old man back when he wasn't. Dad grew up on WREATH, a magical moon locked in endless conflict with LANDFALL, the very planet it orbited. By all accounts, it was a pretty decent life. See, by the time my father was born, Wreath and Landfall had already taken their fight elsewhere in the galaxy. The front lines had moved to distant PROXY WARS, waged mostly by unlucky draftees or conscripts from other worlds. The hatred between superpowers remained, though the average citizen no longer gave the ongoing bloodshed much thought. But my father didn't come from an average family. Apparently, this is his first memory. When dad was just a boy, his mother and father took him to the site of the final battle fought on Wreath. Even the moon's soil still remembered the massacre that took place that day. His parents didn't say a word, but the point of their lesson was clear. Never forget. Never forget the countless heroes who sacrificed so much. And more importantly, never forget those evil fucks with the wings. So yeah, that was then. I just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page before this next part. **We are small, but the universe is not. That's how my family hoped to survive the many diverse entities who wanted us dead or worse. As long as we kept moving, our pursuers would have little chance of finding us in the vastness of space. Sooner or later, they'd have to give up. That was the hope, at least. The powers that be were outraged that I'd been born... but outrageous things happen all the time during a war. If we could just wait it out, my parents felt our opponents would inevitably become distracted by more pressing concerns. We'd never be forgiven, but maybe we'd be forgotten. Still, for all the royal automatons and deranged mercenaries out there, only one thing can really destroy a family. And we all know what that is, right? : 7. Chapter 8 *Hazel **This is how my parents met. I sometimes forget, but mom and dad had lives long before I ever came into the picture. They had dreams that had nothing to do with whether or not I'd grow up to be an acrobat or a brain surgeon. They had their own hopes. They had their own desires. And then, against all odds, they found the perfect person to share everything with. In romantic comedies, this is called the "meet-cue". I've always hated romantic comedies. **Some people are haunted by their pasts, but not my family. I mean, how can you be haunted by something that never really dies? : 8. Chapter 10 *Hazel **Yeah, Dad always had a way with the ladies. Most of them, anyway. **Like I said, the ladies loved my father. But not all of them. **Dad once said that breakups are like battles. They usually involve collateral damage. When former lovers fight, innocents get caught in the crossfire. The end of a long-term relationship is so destructive, it can impact friends, colleagues, people you've never even met. But that's the nice thing about collateral damage. By definition, it's completely incidental to the mission at hand. As long as the right people win, who cares if some random nobody gets hurt in the process? Acceptable losses, etc. : 9. Chapter 11 *Hazel **Yeah, yeah, so my mom and dad used to have sex. What, like your parents just WILLED you into existence... **In that moment, my mother prayed with all of her might that their firstborn would be a GIRL. Some dreams really do come true. That said, most dreams are weird as shit. **The next morning, they cremated my grandfather in the belly of our ship. I still have a scrap of the outfit he made for me. These days, I use it as a bookmark. :10. Chapter 12 *Hazel **Prince Robot IV was almost always right. But he was dead wrong about my family coming to Quietus anytime soon. We'd already been there a week. :11. Chapter 13 *Hazel **Right, where were we? Oh yeah, cutting across the Clockwork Stars on our way to a fog-shrouded world. My parents were hoping to find a man named D. Oswald Heist, author of their favorite book. I had just shit myself. It had been a few weeks since my grandfather died. **Granny was right to worry. Some of the many people who wanted us dead, like Prince Robot IV here, were right on our heels. Others were just taking a more scenic route. **Quietus was the first place my family ever laid down roots. I haven't been back in years, but I can still remember the way Mom described its smell. Like secondhand smoke from her first crush. It was Granny's idea to make my nightly babysitter Izabel double as our advance man. **Over the years, we met every kind of person imaginable. But no one makes worse first impressions than writers. Okay, almost no one... :12. Chapter 14 *Hazel **Actually, my mother never again set foot on the planet where she was born. Granny and I did, but that wasn't until long after this trip... so I'll just shut up now. **Shortly after they're born, most Landfallian babies are cleansed in a ritual immersion symbolizing a new beginning. This was mine. **Back on Quietus, my parents and I were getting our first look at a house with more stories than its owner. **Granny would never love anyone the way she loved my grandfather, but that doesn't mean she never loved again. :13. Chapter 15 *Hazel **I don't know exactly how many people my mother killed. At least, not how many before she gave birth to me. **My family had been guests at the lighthouse of writer D. Oswald Heist for five blissful days (during which no writing was accomplished). **Across the way, things were finally looking up for some of the nice folks who wanted to murder my parents. **Some parents let their young kids win at games, but mine never did. I don't think it was because they were particularly competitive, they just wanted to teach me a valuable lesson. Life is mostly just learning how to lose. :14. Chapter 16 *Hazel **It wasn't exactly ACTION-PACKED, but if most of your childhood didn't look exactly like this, I feel sorry for you. **After years of pitched battles, my father was ready for a significantly less stressful career. Unfortunately, he decided to try raising a girl. **Later that evening, my parents and I slept, while the couple actually plotting my future conspired. **I guess you already know what happens next. Prince Robot IV finally rolls into town. **So yeah, this piece of work goes on to brutally interrogate our host while my family is forced to cower in terrified silence. After that, things got action-packed. :15. Chapter 17 *Hazel **Here's the thing, everybody loves babies... but only in very, VERY small doses. My parents and I had spent an entire week inside the cosmic lighthouse of D. Oswald Heist. It was starting to look like we'd overstayed our welcome. *Brian K. Vaughan **The advice to "kill your darlings" has been attributed to various authors across the galaxy... and Mister Heist hated them all. Why teach young writers to edit out whatever it is they feel most passionate about? Better to kill everything in their writing they DON'T love as much. Until only the darlings remain. :16. Chapter 18 *Hazel **Thanks to my parents, we were able to escape Quietus that night... but not with the remains of their late hero, D. Oswald Heist. Mom and Dad wanted to stick around for a proper burial, but my devastated Granny argued that Heist would have appreciated where he ended up... mixed amongst the ashes of his creations. **It would be a very long time before we saw any of our original pursuers again. At least, it seemed kinda long. But nothing warps time quite like childhood. I remember visits to faraway worlds that lasted only a few days but felt like entire lifetimes. And then there were the endless journeys between destinations that somehow went by in the blink of an eye. You know how it goes. :17. Chapter 19 *Dengo **This is the story of two worlds forever at war, a planet called Landfall and a moon called Wreath. But it's also the story of a distant land that circled them both. The Robot Kingdom is a dwarf planet, which doesn't means that dwarves live there (though maybe a few do, I don't know). It just means the place is too big to be considered a moon and too small to be considered a real planet. So like all middle children, the Kingdom picked sides carefully. For their many contributions to the Coalition of Landfall over the years, the Robots prospered handsomely. At least, some of them did. Not everyone is lucky enough to win the nobility lottery, of course. But that doesn't mean the rest of us are mere serfs. We're commoners. And our castles are made of air. *Hazel **My family and I spent my toddling days on another world altogether, GARDENIA, an ugly planet with gorgeous weather. Soak it up, I'm not always this adorable. We'd been safely ensconced here for several months, and... you know what, forget it. You'll catch up. **But we didn't travel all this way for ballet lessons. Gardenia was also home to a vaguely underground group called the Open Circuit. It's kind of hard to explain, but somehow, my mother was briefly able to make a living at it. That's Mom in the wig, believe it or not. I've seen a few of her episodes over the years. Some of the special effects are cool. **This is the story of how my parents split up. :18. Chapter 20 *Hazel ** Category:Blog posts